The
PC64 is an excellent choice for those that want to
overclock at high bus speeds. Although
RAMBUS does have a steep price tag at this point
in time, you will find perfect stability at Front
Side bus speeds beyond 133MHz. In fact, we
took our P3-500E as far as the PC64 allowed.
The PC64 has a maximum FSB speed of 153MHz.
We wish there were a few more high end bus speeds
or even the granularity of the Abit BE6-II.
If we had more of these higher end FSB clocks
available, we are almost sure our P3-500E would
have gone even further. Regardless, this
board cranks up the CPU clock very high with great
ease and rock solid stability.

Click
image

Benchmarks
and the PC64

The
hardware needs better software.

First
we have some preliminary raw CPU and Memory scores
from SiSoft's Sandra 99.

Click
images

Sandra
CPU Benchmark

Sandra
Memory Benchmark

Sandra
Mult-Media Benchmark

You
can't argue with these scores. The Copermine
at 763MHz.is bolstered by excellent memory
bandwidth. Now we just need those silly
RAMBUS prices to drop

ZD
WinBench 99

Click
for a closer look

Very good CPU
numbers were put up by the PC64 here. That
was to be expected with CPU clock rates being
driven in the 750MHz. range. However, there
seems to be a gap in the drive performance numbers
versus other scores we have seem with a similar
i820 board, the Gigabyte GA-6CX. We are
looking into this further and will update these
scores if need be.

Quake
3 Areana - 32Bit Color

Finally,
we wanted to see if AGP Performance had improved
with this new i820 board we were testing.
Historically we have seen that Intel's new chipset
and the drivers behind the i820 AGP
implementation, were still slightly immature and
lagged behind the performance of a BX board and
even VIA Apollo Pro133A products. We took
the following scores with an Elsa Erazor X2
GeForce DDR card.

These scores are
representative of a slight improvement overall but
are still a notch lower than the other chipset
solutions like the Intel BX or VIA Apollo
Pro133A. Intel is obviously still in the
debug stage with their AGP drivers.
Optimizations with respect to speed will hopefully
come soon with future releases from Intel.

Conlcusion

All
told, the PC64 is a solid and stable
performer. We would have preferred a little
more room for expansion with the addition of
another PCI slot. On the other hand, we have
yet to see any i820 board released that has this
configuration. The raw CPU performance and
great memory bandwidth of this board, as well as
others in the i820 class for that matter, are
being held back somewhat by Intel's young and
unrefined drivers for their new chipset.
Over time we expect that the i820 platform will
mature a begin to shine more in real world
applications. For now, the ball is still in
Intel's court. They can support this chipset
or move on to the next generation. We'll
have to wait and see.